A Setup for multi-UAV hardware-in-the-loop simulations

Abstract

In this paper, we present a hardware-in-the-loop simulation setup for multi-UAV systems. With our setup we are able to command the robots simulated in Gazebo, a popular open source ROS-enabled physical simulator, using computational units that are embedded on our quadrotor UAVs. Hence, we can test in simulation not only the correct execution of algorithms, but also the computational feasibility directly on the robot's hardware. In addition, since our setup is inherently multi-robot, we can also test the communication flow among the robots. We provide two use cases to show the characteristics of our setup.